Trump’s war on Iran: America’s shame, and the world’s failure

Well, the woke Marxist liberals wouldn’t give him the Nobel Peace Prize, and wouldn’t even let him have Greenland as a treat. So, really, what choice did he have?

The joke isn’t funny, I agree. That’s because it comes too close to the truth. There are various ways to understand the U.S.-Israeli bombing attack on Iran launched on Saturday morning, which according to some reports has killed the Iranian regime’s senior religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. None of them have anything to do with democratic legitimacy or coherent geopolitical strategy. This pseudo-war is based on false or dubious premises, has little or no popular support and professes unclear or unachievable goals.

This disastrous turn of events should shame America, and shame the world. Indeed, it exposes yet again the disgraceful failures of both American politics and global diplomacy, as well as the unrelenting and apparently incurable moral blindness of U.S. foreign policy. Whether “we,” to use an objectionable term of art, actually learned anything from 20 years of catastrophic and self-destructive war in Iraq and Afghanistan has now been decisively answered in the negative.

Consider this passage from a recent New York Review essay by former Obama national security official Ben Rhodes. It’s nominally about former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War, but Rhodes clearly intends the contemporary resonance:

What led men like him into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about?  … What innate confidence in our own special character leads the U.S. government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?

Rhodes, who has experienced something of a road-to-Damascus conversion since leaving the White House, understands all too well that American exceptionalism remains a powerful and dangerous form of hopium, and that a vanishingly small number of Americans in the elite classes are entirely immune to the high. Donald Trump and his inner circle launched this entirely unnecessary war, driven by their aggressively ignorant meme-fueled understanding of global relations, but everyone in the ride-along camp or the “hmm, maybe” contingent must share the blame. It’s been profoundly disorienting to hear mainstream commentators, including some who identify as liberals, flirting once again with the phrase “regime change,” as if they were late-night texting that seductive bad-boy ex they can’t resist.

Anyone who persuaded themselves to vote for Trump based on his supposed peacenik or isolationist philosophy — may Maureen Dowd’s 2016 column on “Donald the Dove” live on in infamy — was volunteering to get rolled like the proverbial drunken rube at the county fair. We know that much, and we should also know by now that for Trump, the entire drama is about him.

In the two-dimensional Plato’s cave of Trump’s mind, the fate of the Iranian people and the prospect of regional war in the Middle East are only flickering shadows on the wall. History, for Trump, is literally his story: This is an act of personal and political desperation, a supposedly daring roll of the dice aimed at rescuing his corrupt and crumbling regime by attaching it to a glorious American victory.

Considered in narrow functional terms, the Iran attack is not likely to achieve its stated objectives or to redeem the narrative of Trump’s presidency. That’s not especially reassuring under these volatile and unpredictable circumstances: By far the most likely outcomes are significant medium-term blowback for both Israel and the U.S., and worsening misery for the Iranian people.

There is literally no precedent for bombing a country into regime change, and Trump’s only saving grace, in this context, is that he’s too chicken-hearted to send in ground troops. Late on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to suggest that Ayatollah Khamenei had been killed in the initial strike, although Iranian state media has not confirmed that. Khamenei’s death would almost certainly not mean that the Islamic Republic’s political and religious leadership, which is a complex bureaucratic hierarchy, has been decapitated or seriously damaged. President Masoud Pezeshkian is reportedly safe somewhere outside Tehran.

Iran is a complex and dynamic society of 93 million people, which has been persistently and almost deliberately misunderstood by most Westerners, especially American political elites. There is clearly widespread internal opposition to the theocratic regime, especially in Tehran and other major cities, but there’s no coordinated revolutionary or resistance movement that’s ready to stage a violent rebellion based on a midnight speech delivered by Florida Man in a USA baseball cap.

No doubt there are Iranians who would welcome a U.S.-sponsored coup or even a military invasion, but it requires upper-level neocon delusions to imagine that would be the general response. Most Iran experts believe that a far larger number would resist any such outside intervention, not because they support the current government but because they value national sovereignty, an issue that Trump’s neo-imperialist foreign policy views as bewildering or irrelevant. Why in the world should Canadians or Greenlanders, just for instance, want to be those things when they could be third-string Americans?

Faint signals of resistance can be detected from unlikely quarters. Trump has squandered so much political capital over the past year-plus that the habitually craven Democratic leadership in the House and Senate — after consulting opinion polls, no doubt — has come out in nearly unanimous opposition to this misadventure. Some Democrats now hope to push a symbolic but fruitless vote on the War Powers Act, although Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat reborn as a hardcore Israel supporter, has pronounced himself a “hard no.”

The New York Times expressed its collective sad in a medium-strength editorial that briefly drifts into “regime change maybe sometimes shrug” territory before returning to approximate reality. The Washington Post, having demoted itself to eager-beaver MAGA waterboy, published several hundred words of feckless dithering simultaneously suggesting that a full-on ground war might be necessary and that a “comprehensive case has yet to be made” for any war at all.

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None of this makes up for the shameful collapse of America’s political system mentioned above, in which Congress, at first reluctantly and then enthusiastically, has abandoned its oversight function of the executive branch in favor of posturing and complaining. And it’s no good avoiding the Netanyahu-shaped elephant in the room: Israel’s far-right government and its well-funded American supporters have exercised such a persistent distortion effect on U.S. foreign policy that it’s difficult to see where it begins or ends.

Netanyahu has sought to push the U.S. into all-out war with Iran throughout his entire political career, endlessly retailing the same dubious narrative — now entrenched in the American political vernacular as a pseudo-fact — that the Iranians were days or weeks away from building a nuclear bomb. Given that Iran presents no plausible military threat to the U.S., and was clearly eager to reach an agreement that would avoid military confrontation, it’s reasonable to ask which nation’s interests were most important in launching this war. (Israeli officials made a point of noting that their forces were first to strike Iran.)

As for the rest of the world, shame and hypocrisy abound. Tepid objections have come in from U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, an increasingly meaningless figurehead, along with a handful of neutral, uninvolved or insignificant nations. But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — just moments ago a shining hero of the global anti-Trump resistance! — has fully signed on to this unprompted Yank aggression, as has Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. They still know how to behave when America cracks the whip, as do British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the other European leaders who have scuttled back into their mouse-holes and said little or nothing. This war will lead nowhere good — and then the collective shame over how we got here will, as usual, be swept under the carpet and forgotten.

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